grunt-wkhtmltopdf

A simple Grunt multitask that uses wkhtmltopdf to convert HTML files to PDF. Convertion to PDF takes care of @media print CSS rules and preserves links to remote web pages.

Getting Started

Setting up wkhtmltopdf

Download and install wkhtmltopdf from the project page.

Make sure wkhtmltopdf is accessible from your PATH (Try wkhtmltopdf -V in your Terminal). I'm on Mac OS X, so I created the following symlink to my /usr/local/bin/ folder:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf.app/Contents/MacOS/wkhtmltopdf /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

You can also install it via homebrew: $ brew install wkhtmltopdf.

Use it with grunt

Install this grunt plugin next to your project's grunt.js gruntfile with: npm install grunt-wkhtmltopdf

Then add this line to your project's grunt.js gruntfile:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-wkhtmltopdf');

Documentation

Simply add task definition in your gruntfile. See the folllowing example:

    //...
    wkhtmltopdf: {
      dev: {
        src: 'path/to/some/html/file/*.html',
        dest: 'pdf/output/'
      },
      prod: {
        src: 'path/to/some/html/file/*.html',
        dest: 'pdf/output/'
      }
    },
    //...

Run grunt wkhtmltopdf to execute all the targets or grunt wkhtmltopdf:targetname to execute a specific target. Every html file defined by the src parameter will be turned into a PDF and saved to dest folder.

Sending arguments to wkhtml2pdf

Arguments sent via the args key in the task definition will be forwarded to wkhtml2pdf as follow :

    //...
    wkhtmltopdf: {
      prod: {
        src: 'path/to/some/html/file/*.html',
        dest: 'pdf/output/',
        args: [
          '--dpi', '96',
          '--print-media-type',
          '--grayscale'
        ]
      }
    },
    //...

Defining custom arguments will override default ones:

// grunt-wkhtml2pdf default arguments
var args = [
  '--dpi', '96',
  '--print-media-type'
]

See wkhtml2pdf documentation for available options

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using grunt.

Release History

• v0.5.0:
  • Merged #12 (Fix #11) : Added async support
  • Merged #9 : Added ability to override the arguments
• v0.4.0:
  • Update project config files to work with Grunt 0.4
  • Update wkthmltopdf task to use Grunt 0.4 multi-task API
  • Improve predictability of the destination for created PDFs
• v0.3.0: grunt-wkhtmltopdf is now a multi-task
• v0.2.0: Fixed compatibility with grunt 0.4
• v0.1.0: First Release

License

Copyright (c) 2012 Olivier Audard Licensed under the MIT license.